Doll Face
by violence4
Summary: You can't be pretty. You have to be ugly.


**Okay. More horrible angst and pain from me, I'm afraid. I wrote this last night at about 3 in the morning when I was randomly very depressed and crying a lot. Not sure why.**

**But anyway, I wrote this as a kind of therapy. I seem to be discovering the joys of torturing Vince. Dear me. Still, when I read it back this morning I thought it was okay so I decided to put it up. Sorry if it's a bit rambling but as I said, I wrote it at about 3 in the morning.**

**Disclaimers:  
Mighty Boosh and all its characters belong to Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding.  
Bryan Ferry belongs to himself.  
The original idea for the doll came from a bit in the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". It was only the very basis of the idea, but just so I don't get sued.**

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**Doll Face**

Darkness isn't really the safe erotic blanket people think it is. Instead it is empty. You fill it with whatever you want to fill it with, and he fills it with pain. Pain that stretches out around his bed, off into the room and beyond, until the pain is the darkness, and the darkness is the world.

And the only things that let him know there is something else are the line of light coming from the hallway through the half-open bedroom door, and the warmth of the tears running from his eyes and straight down into his hair, as though they are trying to hide; as though, like everything else, they are ashamed to be seen.

You must be ashamed to be seen when all you are made of is plastic and a collection of scars.

Scars.

Scars on his shoulders – yes, he knew even as a thirteen-year-old discovering a razor that these scars needed to be hidden, and his father knew too, that time he threw his son against the wall – and scars on his soul, whatever soul he might have. He doesn't know if souls exist. And even if they do, would he have one? He is totally empty.

He isn't one of those people who have suffered and lost themselves. He never had a "self" to lose.

The water pipes gurgle.

He doesn't even bother reaching for the crumpled wads of tissue by his bed anymore. He gave up long ago; they only scratch his face. Insignificant hurts, compared to everything else, but so what? He no longer cares. It makes no difference to wipe the tears away; it is a waste of time. Instead, he simply huddles under the blanket, shivering, clutching his skinny elbows as though trying to hold himself together. He has often felt like he is coming apart.

He was never that well put together, anyway. His mother and father, they were always too busy to bother with that job. They had more important things to do. His mother had to sob under the pillow every night, drink red wine in front of the television most days. His father had to take the car out on long drives. They both had to bring whores or mates back, whores and mates who never stayed long. They both had to push each other, force each other away.

He had to lie in his bed then too. He always seems to be in beds, alone, searching for something. Then, he had a night light, but whether that made it better or worse is, like many things in this ever-lasting dark, unclear. The night light made a faint, glowing circle on the wall. A tiny place that wasn't dark – but the dark at the edges seemed even worse. He'd sit, spine against the chipping white paint, listening to "Bastard!" and "Slut!" from downstairs and trying not to let the dark get too close, because if it touched him, he'd die. That's the way it is with people. He'd hold his doll. Vincent.

Vincent came from a car boot sale. He'd bought it for one Euro, and his parents didn't know he had it. Vincent wasn't a boy or a girl, because whether Vincent was a boy or a girl was irrelevant. Vincent was ugly.

Vincent was ugly because it was empty. It had no personality, no mind, nothing.

In shops, he sometimes saw pink plastic boxes: dolls like Vincent, but much newer, much more glamorous, with ball gowns and tuxedos, and cars and horses to ride. Dolls that were male or female. Dolls that lived in happy little groups, sometimes groups of friends, and sometimes families. Vincent the doll had none of these things: no friends, no family. Vincent the doll's only acquaintances were its owner, who gripped its legs at night for some peculiar comfort, and the gerbils, Fluffy and Whiskers, who its owner spent a lot of time with – but these weren't friends. It had no parents.

Vincent the doll was also ugly because it wasn't allowed to be pretty.

One time, its owner's parents had yet another argument because its owner's mother had found its owner experimenting with her make-up and hadn't told him to take it off. "What did you think you were doing?" "What do you mean, what was I doing?" "Letting our son do things like that!" "I was busy! Busy cooking your dinner, you lazy arsehole. If you care so much what our son does, maybe you should be at home more!" "For God's sake, you stupid cow! He's five years old! He shouldn't be wearing make-up! Don't you care?"

"Daddy," whimpered the young boy, who didn't understand then, and sometimes still doesn't understand now, "Daddy, I just wanted to look pretty, like the ladies in Mummy's magazines..."

"'Pretty'? 'Pretty'? You can't be 'pretty', Vincent! You're a boy! You're not supposed to be 'pretty'!"

Vincent the doll had a cropped head. Its owner had done that when he bought it, to make it ugly. It had no doll's clothes, so it was naked, and its skin was dirty from another child playing with it. He sometimes used to tell the doll about all the outfits he'd like to wear, while his parents fought, to distract himself. Then he'd shake it and bash it on the wall. "You can't be pretty, Vincent! You have to be ugly! You have to be ugly!"

Eventually, he pulled Vincent's head off.

A police siren wails on the road outside, unseen.

It's freezing. The heating is broken. Across the room, as the headlights go by, his mirror is momentarily lit up, glassy and ghostly. There's a crack in one corner of it because it's getting a bit old and he can't afford a new one, so he just pretends this one is okay.

Vanity is necessary. He needs to keep looking at himself to make sure he's still there.

He feels like a doll himself.

"Hey, doll face," a girl in a club once said to him, with a giggling smile.

She was Doll Face really, in the traditional sense: soft, gentle features, big eyes, streaks of pink in her hair, as though she was a girls' toy.

He isn't. He's an ugly doll, not the kind of doll you'd want your child to have. Perfect Too perfect. A bad example. So perfect it's struggling to keep itself under control. Breaking apart.

Because whatever it is he is made of – whether it's plastic and scars or just something else not worth it – threatens to break at any moment, exposing him for what he really is: ugly. Just like his old toy. And if he comes apart, then he really will be left totally empty, physically as well as emotionally.

Outside, in the city, everything is silent, and dyed a lonely orange from the street lights. He knows this is what it looks like, even without getting out of bed. The number of times he has walked the city at night, he has lost count. The deserted streets agreed with him.

"You can't be 'pretty', Vincent!"

Oh, how he has proved his father wrong. Him and that stupid doll that thought it had to be ugly. Now he is so stunning that people turn around to stare at him in the street. Now he has huge blue eyes, high cheek bones, jet black hair. He is extremes. He is sharp. If people get too near he might cut them.

It's a defensive mechanism, partly. Like an animal. He likes animals, because they don't judge. And they talk differently to people. He used to spend a lot of time with animals when he lived with his parents. Back then he only liked animals, and Vincent the doll, before its head came off, and one friend of his parents called Bryan, because Bryan didn't shout – but Bryan only came occasionally because his job meant he kept having to travel far away.

He cuts people because he can't let them near.

If he lets them near, he knows just what will happen: raised voices. Glasses smashing against the walls. Fucking strangers on the stairs. Hands to faces, shoulders, chests. His perfect skin will be purple and yellow and black, the way his mother's breasts were once after his father's fists got on them during a violent row. His outside is the only part of him that looks flawless. If he loses that he really will have nothing left. He has to keep that one thing safe. His pale skin. His ice prison.

If he lets them near, he'll be crying even harder, head under the pillow. He'll be slashing himself again, and this time his wrists, the way she did, in the bathroom. Someone will find him, the way he and Vincent the doll found her. There will be blood around their feet so they leave footprints down the stairs when they run screaming. The footprints won't wash out of the carpet, even after he fails, yet again, and is brought home, arms bandaged, as she was.

But being inside the ice prison, he freezes. He freezes until he scarcely even feels that it hurts him like a thousand knives all over. He supposes he is used to hurting, because it's all he ever did. He's used to the nights alone, not able to sleep because he needs to keep himself in. In the dark, again. Where he hates himself because that's when he cries, and crying shows feeling. His father smacked him round the head. "Stop crying! What kind of a boy are you? Do you want people to think you're soft? Do you? _Do you?_ Then stop crying!"

In the dark, he hates himself because he feels like he comes closer to what he really is. A twisted, corrupted, blackened thing, tortured beyond recognition.

He's not even sure what that thing looked like in the first place, so how could he ever try to fix it?

Did it look like the other people he knows? His best friend, for instance? Could he ever have had that gentle face, those soft brown eyes? Could he ever have looked like that?

Maybe he was always doomed. His mother used to hug him and sob against his dirty blond hair. "You're so special, Vincent. So special... you're going to be so great... you're so special..." and on and on, her voice rising until she was nearly hysterical. Special, special, special. That was what she said. She'd use him to hold after the arguments. Then she'd buy him sweets. He'd sit at her feet eating them while she watched chat shows. He'd cry. Sometimes she'd hold him again. Sometime she'd be like his father, and kick him from where she sat on the sofa without even bothering to look at him.

Much later, when his father finally punched his mother so hard she needed metal plates in her jaw, he went to live with Bryan. Bryan liked animals too and there were plenty around where he lived. Fluffy came, but not Whiskers because he'd died of old age.

Vincent the doll had already lost its head.

When he was fifteen Bryan found blood in his shirts and realised what he'd been doing.

"I wanted to see what I'm like underneath," he told Bryan, the councillors, the adults whose faces swam in front of him. They were worried because of what his mother had done, and wondered if it ran in families. He didn't know what It was. But whatever It was, It didn't. He wasn't like his family. His parents, they'd been close, once. Before he came along and spoiled it all. His mother told him they got married within six months of meeting. Back at home, they still had photographs of themselves in love in the house. Love. That was what had caused the pain. What a stupid waste. He wouldn't ever do that to himself.

He was in hospital for a while after Bryan found the blood on his shirts, but he got worse because there were no animals, only people, people, people and the scent of death. As he lay in bed – once more, a bed – all he'd think would be, how can I get onto a life support machine so they can decide to turn it off?

So they let him out of hospital. When he was sixteen, he left school, which he hadn't been at much over the past year and a half, and had never been able to manage even before, so it didn't matter. He got a job. At a zoo. Bryan agreed to it because he knew being around animals would be good for his adopted son. And because one of the other keepers, a sensible-seeming man, took the new employee under his wing, and Bryan he was pleased that the boy had made a friend. That he might be starting to let someone in.

Let someone in.

This other keeper, who quickly became his best friend, and every day becomes more and more like a worst enemy, is the only person he has ever come close to considering letting in.

But of course, he couldn't. Because love means hurt and violence and blood down his back and his wrists. So does now what he does with this friend what he does with everyone else: toys with his emotions, runs away. It works well. Partly because it helps with the fear that comes whenever his friend tries to talk to him seriously or be affectionate. Partly because it keeps everybody on their toes, vying for him. It convinces everybody that they need him, and if they need him, he will never lose them, and they will never hate him for not being pretty enough, or for being too pretty, or for being anything at all.

And partly it works because it means he doesn't have to let in anybody, not even the man he's lived with, in various places, for over ten years now. Because if he ever really let anyone near, he'd become like his mother, or like his father, or like both. And, worse, if he let anyone in, he'd have to let them see that really, all he is, under the make-up, is Vincent the doll. Naked. Stained from being played with too hard, dropped too many times. One arm at a slightly weird angle from something. Stiff and uncomfortable to hold. Ugly. Empty.

Should he let someone see, he occasionally thinks, so they'll be like he was with his toy, and rip his head off?

That might be better, for everybody. Because for his parents, for Bryan, for the other zoo keeper who is meant to be his friend, for the man who worked the souvenir stand, for the crowds of youths who think he is pretty, for even some of the animals, all he ever causes is pain.

But of course, they'll never be rid of him, because he's too scared to let anybody in, because he won't be like his parents. And if he never lets anyone in, they'll never get a good grip on his hair and tear his empty, ugly skull off his empty, ugly neck.

So he stays Vincent the doll.

And the pain is the dark.

And the dark is the world.

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**Hmm. I need to try writing something happy for a change.**

**Thanks for reading, anyway.**

**violence x**


End file.
